“I can understand all that,” I said. “I am not so deeply rooted in England myself. What bewilders me a little is not your return, but your name over a shop.”
Before now Michael Crowther had looked at me as if I was not all there. I hate to be taken for a congenital idiot when I am making a perfectly reasonable remark; and mine was a reasonable remark — in spite of Michael Crowther and his question.
“Why should that bewilder you, Mr. Legatt?”
“Because” — I was huffy but I meant to be fair— “because from what I remember of your navigation, you could have got another steamer by asking for it. Or if there wasn’t a steamer, an agency to keep you going until there was.”
Crowther’s manner changed completely. There was a warmth in his voice, a gratitude in his eyes.
“That’s kind of you, Mr. Legatt. It is indeed. When your self-esteem has had the bumps which mine has, an unexpected bouquet here and there is very welcome.”
“What are you going to sell, Captain?” I continued. “Antiquities? You? You’re the last man to be interested in dead and gone things. If I were you I shouldn’t drop down to a shop.”
Crowther remained silent for a little while. He looked straight across the moat to the machicolated walls of the Fort. I thought that he must be considering my advice. But I was wrong. He was merely considering me; happily, however, from a new angle. I say happily, because on looking back, I can see that our acquaintanceship took a turn at this corner. It is too early to say that friendship began here, but at all events we were on the road to it.
“I am going to sell nothing at all,” he said. “We’d better have another drink. We have got time”; and when the cool lime squashes stood on the little table between us, he continued: “I have been brooding by myself so long over my story that I have come to think the world knows it as well as I do. Just wait a second!”
He put his thoughts into an order of words before he spoke them. He was not selecting what he should tell me and what he should keep to himself. Reticence was a word omitted from his dictionary. He was so interested in himself that everyone within his reach must know all about him and exactly.
“I was a failure. I hadn’t made any friends. I was cold. I used to wander about on Sunday afternoons into the Park to listen to the spouters and then through the dead streets to get myself dog-tired. Well, one dreadful afternoon, so damp that you felt your bones were wet inside you and as cold as the Poles and South Ken in one, I found myself in a queer little street, garages and oldy Englishy houses and a church.”
I sat forward.
“Farm Street,” I said.
“Oh? May be. I never knew its name. But there were lights in the church windows, and there would be people in there and it’d be warm. So I went in. A man preached about a valley. He was a sensible sort of man — that’s what made me listen. He said this valley bloomed once and was desolate for a few hundred years. You could work out the chronology for yourself if you liked — for himself he wasn’t interested very much in chronology — that’s what took me in the man — a very few hundred years would do for him — sensible, what? — after that it bloomed again, a door of hope.”
“The valley of Achor,” I interrupted.
“Very likely,” said Crowther. “I didn’t catch on to the name.” Suddenly he stopped and stared at me. “Say! You know a lot about the Bible.”
“I was there that afternoon,” I said.
“You?”
“Yes.”
“In that church?”
I nodded my head.
“A little more than a year ago. I saw you in the back pew.”
“That’s right. Now isn’t that odd?” He looked at me reproachfully. “You might have spoken to me, Mr. Legatt.”
“I hadn’t a chance to. You nipped out before the collection reached you.”
“Instinct, Mr. Legatt,” said Crowther smiling. “Nothing more than instinct. But in that case you can realise how hard that sermon hit me.”
“I’m afraid that I can’t,” I answered. “I wasn’t listening closely. I was watching you.”
That seemed to Crowther very natural. No further explanation was required, and he went on:
“Then I must tell you something about it. The valley of Achor was a door of hope. It had bloomed once and hundreds of years afterwards a second time under the smile of God. That was the phrase which took me by storm. A valley all a-bloom under the smile of God. The valley of the Irrawaddy, eh? Where everyone smiles — not only God. I suppose that every feeling I had of darkness and failure and loneliness and cold, had been working up to this moment, had become so much tinder waiting for a spark to set it ablaze. And here was the spark — a phrase spoken by a preacher on a black, dreary afternoon in Farm Street — a valley under the smile of God. I went back to my little furnished flat in a back lane of South Ken like a man who has had a call — a call to lovely things instead of away from them. I sat in my dingy sitting-room with its ugly deal furniture and its bit of Brussels carpet, and I tell you, Mr. Legatt. I heard music. I was going to wind things up and go back.”
He could hardly spare the time that evening to eat his dinner. He had the table cleared the moment the meal was over, and going into his bedroom rummaged in his big trunk. At the bottom of it lay Ma Shwe At’s little silk bag with its embroidery and its pink string and its jingling trinkets. In his hurry to set his foot on the neck of London, he had tucked it away amongst his odds and ends and forgotten all about it. Now he carried it back into his sitting-room and rolled out the ornaments on to his red baize table-cloth, just as he had three years before on to the white linen of the Dagonet. They were all there even to the sapphire in its strip of napkin. The ornaments were tarnished and dull as pewter, but the sapphire glowed with a spark of fire striking up through the blue of tropical seas; and the walls of his room fell away; and a lorry which passed and shook the house was the rumble of his stern-wheel as it thrashed the water of the Irrawaddy.
“Jiminy! I was glad that you hadn’t taken me at my word, Mr. Legatt, and carried the bag back to Tagaung. I knew that I ran a risk, but you carried your nose so high that I could almost see the vocal cords — now didn’t you? — and I had got to show you you were thinking of yourself all the time like everybody else. But you gave me a jar, Mr. Legatt, I won’t deny. You did stand hesitating whether you’d behave like a medieval knight in an opera or not.”
Frankly I did not like his simile. I had no wish to be a knight in an opera, medieval or otherwise. I prided myself upon my actuality. I was a young man of my age with a fair share of hard common sense. I might have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. But I had gone to the forest instead. Homer and heroics meant nothing to me. Wild beasts and the loneliness of great woods meant a great deal. I was annoyed with Crowther absurdly. For I had been on the point of starting back for Tagaung to return to a Burmese girl I didn’t know the presents of a man I detested; and if there’s one thing a man’s heartily ashamed of it’s an experiment in quixotics. I grew a little hot and uncomfortable. I felt at a disadvantage with Crowther, as I had done on one or two occasions before.
“You might get on with your story and leave me out of it,” I said tartly.
The momentary gleam of his old-time impishness faded out from Crowther’s eyes.
“No offence intended, Mr. Legatt,” he cried hurriedly. “I resoom. There were the ornaments in front of me and I spent the evening polishing them until they shone like a lady’s nails before she’s dabbed the blood on them — the silver ring which Ma Shwe At wore round her tiny ankle, the filigree bracelets for her wrists. I tell you, the warmth of her was there in my drab little sitting-room with the red baize table-cloth. I could feel her arms round my neck and see her dark eyes and white teeth laughing at me an inch off my nose. The taste of the flesh, eh?”
Crowther leaned back in his chair, his teeth closed over his lower lip and sucking in his breath.
“You wouldn’t know, but these Burmese girls have got a trick
of sending a little ripple down their arms from their shoulders to their finger-tips, and when their arms are round your neck at the time” — he relapsed into his Americanisms and rubbed his hands together— “oh boy, oh boy!”
I hope that the tip of my nose didn’t rise priggishly into the air. But Crowther certainly hurried on.
“But there was ever so much besides. The fun of her, the chatter, and little Ma Sein dancing up and down on her feet as if she was a puff-ball.”
Yes, I too remembered little Miss Diamond dancing up and down on the sand of the little square at Tagaung. I saw the tiny village, booths and square and pagoda, and the great tamarinds behind lighted up with the golden brilliancy of the headlight and rounded into a circle by the headlight’s shape. I saw it as one sees a scene of marionettes through the spy-hole of a peep-show.
“I remember,” I answered with a smile.
“And even that wasn’t all.” He turned sideways in his chair and leaned across the table, once more surprised by himself. “Do you know that I had been wanting her desperately all this time without knowing it? There was an ache somewhere inside me, something missing, always missing, like someone you have dearly loved, who has been dead for a long while, but you don’t think what it is that’s missing until now and then some association brings you full-face with the knowledge. Well, Ma Shwe At wasn’t dead. I hugged myself when I had worked back to that one vital fact. Ma Shwe At and Ma Sein — Mrs. Golden Needle and Miss Diamond — were still at Tagaung. Those presents were a promise — the preacher’s door of hope. My mind took a hop, skip and a jump — there I was landing from the gang-plank. There they were laughing and waving their hands. The anklet was warm with the warmth of Ma Shwe At as I held it in my hand. I heard myself saying: ‘Beloved Golden Needle, born of the lotus and the moon’ — you know the sort of thing— ‘here is the treasure you asked me to keep safe for you.’”
“Oh ho!” said I. Here was a Michael Crowther whom I did not know, proud of his cunning — that was old — but eager to make restitution — that was new.
“So you are going back to Tagaung!” I said.
“To be sure. That’s why I’ve opened a shop.”
“That’s why you’ve closed a shop,” I corrected.
Crowther raised his eyebrows. He was always astonished if I did not follow at once the working of his mind. He explained compassionately:
“You haven’t got it at all, Mr. Legatt. I’m not going to stay at Tagaung, nor is the shop for me. I’ve got money enough to wait until a good job comes my way. I’m going to bring Ma Shwe At and little Miss Diamond down to Mandalay, and then there’s a shop here to amuse them. All these little Burmese girls love keeping shop. If you trotted into the big Bazaar over there you’d find lots of them selling silks and spices who could well afford to stay at home. They adore having a little business of their own. They make it pay too, I can tell you.”
He laughed with a heartiness which I had never heard in his voice before. It had a ring of enjoyment like the laugh of a friendly man watching children playing cleverly.
“When do you go?” I asked suddenly.
“This morning. On the Moulmein.”
“So do I.”
“I guessed that,” he returned, and to my amazement I caught a note of wistfulness in his voice. “You won’t object, will you? Or call me down if I offer you a drink?”
It was my turn to laugh. Michael Crowther could not live without explaining himself. Conversation was a mirror in which he saw a very interesting person experiencing strange adventures and developing in odd ways through unexpected phases of life.
“I shan’t object at all,” I said. “On the contrary! I find you very much more human than I did before.”
Michael Crowther stared at me and slapped his hand down upon the table.
“That’s the most extraordinary thing,” he cried. “For I was going to say precisely the same thing of you.”
We settled our bill. Crowther’s boy brought to him the key of the shop, and said:
“Master’s bag on board.”
“Good,” said Crowther, and we walked together to the gangway of the Moulmein.
“The door of hope,” said he. “A sensible fellow, that padre,” and he went forward on to the lower deck.
Chapter 5 The Door Closes
THE MOULMEIN WAS a Bazaar boat. It dragged, lashed alongside of it, a big double-decked lighter furnished with shops and stalls and occupied by steerage passengers. It put in at the smaller villages and stayed long enough for the villagers to make their purchases. It was, therefore, not until the forenoon of the second day after we left Mandalay that we tied up against the bank at Tagaung. No storm-lamp flickered a welcome; no headlight transformed the village into a golden spot of fairyland. It was a little place of thatched hovels enclosed by great tamarinds, and fig-trees, with a glimpse of a few bigger houses in a grove at the back. And a miserable, puny pagoda of bamboo and straw at the corner of the square indicated to all men the extremity of its indigence.
The Moulmein with its travelling shops was expected; for the central space was thronged. Michael Crowther stood at my side on the open deck, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and running his eyes eagerly over the crowd. A look of disappointment clouded his face.
“I don’t see them,” he said. “Do you?”
“No.”
“Yet they would naturally have met the Bazaar boat. Even if they didn’t want to buy anything, it’s the place for gossip. Of course I wasn’t expected.”
He repeated that consolation as, leaning over the rail, he watched the men and women file along the gangway on to the steamer and across the lower deck on to the lighter beyond.
“I wasn’t expected. That’s it, of course.” But he was uneasy. It looked as if the whole valley had turned out with the exception of Mrs. Golden Needle and Miss Diamond. Crowther turned to me. “Are you coming?”
I had not meant to go ashore at all. But Crowther wanted support and bad news might be awaiting him. After all, young people did die in the villages of the Irrawaddy as elsewhere in the world.
“Yes, I’ll come,” I replied, and then, less carelessly, I added! “I certainly will come with you, Captain.”
For when my eyes moved from him to the shore it suddenly struck me there was something unusual in the aspect of the place. There were no women left by the landing-place. That was to be expected. They were all by this time chattering and bargaining upon the lighter. But there was a large group of men, and these men, instead of sitting about on the sand indolently talking according to their habit, stood and watched the steamer in silence.
Crowther descended to the lower deck and I followed him.
“Of course I wasn’t expected,” he repeated.
But he was wrong. I had an impression that he was expected even before he stepped off the gangway. But the moment he did, the impression became a certainty. For at once the group moved and according to a plan. It spread out, deploying into a line at the edge of the bank and as Crowther walked up the slope, the flanks of the line moved forwards and inwards, enclosing him and barring him from the village. They were all so far quite silent and their faces were quite impassive. Perhaps it was for those reasons that I felt the whole position to be dangerous. I was walking just behind Michael Crowther’s shoulder. And from a slight hesitation in his movements, I realised that he, too, was disturbed. When he reached the top of the bank and could go no farther without jostling one of these sentinels, an old man with a thin straggling white beard spoke, smiling softly:
“We are happy to see the thakin again. It is a long time since the thakin was here and it does us good to see him. And now he will shake hands with us and go back again upon the steamer.”
Crowther looked from one face to another.
“You expected me?”
“A friend brought us word by the last boat that the thakin was coming to see us.”
“To see Ma Shwe At.”
Michael Cr
owther corrected the old man in a loud and rising voice, so that the name of his mistress rang out across the hovels and the booths. It was a call to her, wherever she was hidden, the call to the mate, heard in forest and jungle and trimmed garden, and wherever manners have not cloaked passion. But it was a cry for help too, so sudden, so poignant that it took my breath away. A dreadful terror of loneliness inspired it. I suppose that it was because I was behind Crowther and could not see his face. But I almost believed that someone else had uttered the cry, some unknown man breaking under the compulsion of pain and fear. Then he stood still, listening with both his ears, and it seemed to me with every tense nerve in his body, for an answer, however distant, however faint.
But no answer came — unless a quiet constriction of the circle about him could be called an answer.
“Ma Shwe At will not hear,” the old man said gently. “It is four years since the thakin went away and in four years many things must happen. Ma Shwe At suffered and was unhappy. Ma Sein cried through many nights. But all that is over now.”
“Over? But I am here to fetch them both to my home — —” began Crowther.
The old man shook his head.
“Ma Shwe At is married to a man with many rice-fields. She is happy again. I beg the thakin to shake hands with us all and go away.”
Crowther looked from face to face. There were young men there and there were old. There was no ill-will in their looks; but they pressed about him, not touching him but hampering him. He was shut within a round wall of living people. He could not have burst through that close-drawn cordon had he possessed the strength of Hercules, so near they stood and ready. But he didn’t try. He drew back a step and his right hand flashed down into the side pocket of his jacket.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 640